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New 3 season Crowsnest - how much loft?

I just got my new Crowsnest in the mail last night, and took it out, shook it a bit and hung it up overnight to give it a chance to loft up. I ordered the 900fp down option for it. I'll have to say, I was expecting more loft for a 20 degree rated quilt. What are others experiences with this? Pisanodc purchased one too, and just received his in the mail this week and he had the same impression. Maybe I just need to run it through the dryer with a tennis ball and let it de-clump a bit more. I have purchased a number of quilts and never had this issue happen before.

Loft....

You should not need to run it in the dryer to declump it. That is usually reserved for quilts that have been wet or washed and you need to separate the clusters that got wet and stuck together....

What might be happening is that some of the down might not have been distributed enough here at the shop. It can happen sometimes.

We try to get things spread out as much as possible after we "inject" the down into each chamber. The tube of down that goes into each chamber is packed fairly tight right before it goes in. When all the chambers are full, we sew up the 4th side prepare for the final stage. The last stage consists of us spreading out the down along the chambers and preparing it for packaging. If, while we are spreading out the down, we do not give things enough time to loft out under the new densities along the chambers, there might be areas that have a little more loft than others. Most of the time it is noticed more at one end than another.

This kind of uneven distribution can also happen during stuffing and unstuffing of quilts. If the quilt gets shaken after it is taken out (which is common because it helps get air into the down and loft things up) it be shaken in a way that would slide the insulation down to one end or another, if that makes sense. One way to avoid this from happening too much is to make sure you are shaking the quilt with minimal force and that you are doing so while holding the long side and not the short end.

If you do find that things look like they are lofting up more in some areas than others there are a couple of things you might try. Try "swatting" at the down. This procedure basically looks like you are slapping the down from a high point to a low point. So, you swat the insulation a little and then pick the quilt up to see if you notice a difference. Repeat as necessary.

Try a couple of these ideas. Let me know if things still do not look right.

Thanks for chiming in Adam. I'll definitely spend some more time this weekend and try to get the down more evenly distributed to see what loft I've really got here. I've already seen a little bit of improvement. Maybe I'm just accustomed to a bit more overstuffing.

BTW, the workmanship looks great and I'm looking forward to getting this baby out on the trail.

Good thread and I'm glad Adam chimed in on it, but would expect no less from his excellent customer service. I've got a 3 Season CrowsNest on order as well. Hopefully, I should be seeing it shipped in the next week or so.

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